*Playanos is a Spanish word meaning “beach people.”
*“The Four Corners of the World,” the name for the Inca empire; “Inca” is properly the name of the emperor.
*In Hebrew, this is a play on words; ish meaning “man,” and isha meaning “woman.”
4. The Earliest Times
I often wonder where lie hidden the boundaries of recognition between man and the beast whose heart knows no spoken language. Through what primal paradise in a remote morning of creation ran the simple path by which their hearts visited each other? Those marks of their constant tread have not been effaced though their kinship has long been forgotten. Yet suddenly in some wordless music the dim memory wakes up and the beast gazes into the man’s face with a tender trust, and the man looks down into its eyes with amused affection. It seems that the two friends meet masked, and vaguely know each other through the disguise.
—Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941),
Indian poet, ‘The Gardener”
THE BIBLICAL FALL (Genesis 3:1-24)
The serpent was the most subtle of all the wild beasts that Yahweh God had made. It asked the woman, “Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?” The woman answered the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees in the garden. But of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said ‘You must not eat it, nor touch it, under pain of death.’” Then the serpent said to the woman, “No! You will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.” The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and that it was desirable for the knowledge that it could give. So she took some of its fruit and ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized that they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together to make themselves loincloths.
The man and his wife heard the sound of Yahweh God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from Yahweh God among the trees of the garden. But Yahweh God called to the man. “Where are you?” he asked. “I heard the sound of you in the garden,” he replied. “I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.” “Who told you that you were naked?” he asked. “Have you been eating of the tree I forbade you to eat?” The man replied, “It was the woman you put with me; she gave me the fruit and I ate it.” Then Yahweh God asked the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman replied, ‘The serpent tempted me and I ate.”
Then Yahweh God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,
Be accursed beyond all cattle,
all wild beasts.
You shall crawl on your belly and eat dust
every day of your life.
I will make you enemies of each other;
you and the woman,
your offspring and her offspring.
It will crush your head
and you will strike its heel.”
To the woman he said: “I will multiply your pains in child-bearing, you shall give birth to your children in pain. Your yearning shall be for your husband yet he will lord it over you.”
To the man he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree which I had forbidden you to eat,
Accursed be the soil because of you.
With suffering shall you get your food from it
every day of your life.
It shall yield you brambles and thistles
and you shall eat wild plants
With sweat on your brow
shall you eat your bread
until you return to the soil
as you were taken from it.
For dust you are
and to dust you shall return.”
The man named his wife “Eve” because she was the mother of all those who live. Yahweh God made clothes out of skins for the man and his wife, and they put them on. Then Yahweh God said, “See the man has become like one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil. He must not be allowed to stretch his hand out next and pick from the tree of life also, and eat some and live forever.” So Yahweh God expelled him from the garden of Eden, to till the soil from which he had been taken. He banished the man, and in front of the garden of Eden he posted the cherubs, and the flame of a flashing sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.
A Modern Theologians Interpretation of the Fall
The story of Genesis, chapters 1-3, if taken as a myth, can guide our description of the transition from essential to existential being. It is the profoundest and richest expression of man’s awareness of his existential estrangement and provides the scheme in which the transition from essence to existence can be treated. It points, first, to the possibility of the Fall; second to its motives; third to the event itself; and fourth, to its consequences …
… If the transition from essence to existence is expressed mythologically—as it must be in the language of religion—it is seen as an event of the past, although it happens in all three modes of time. The event of the past to which traditional theology refers is the story of the Fall as told in the Book of Genesis. Perhaps no text in literature has received so many interpretations as the third chapter of Genesis. This is partly due to its uniqueness—even in biblical literature—partly to its psychological profundity, and partly due to its religious power. In mythological language it describes the transition from essence to existence as a unique event which happened long ago in a special place to individual persons—first to Eve, then to Adam. God himself appears as an individual person in time and space as a typical “father figure.” The whole description has a psychological-ethical character and is derived from the daily experiences of people under special cultural and social conditions. Nevertheless, it has a claim to universal validity. The predominance of psychological and ethical aspects does not exclude other factors in the biblical story. The serpent represents the dynamic trends of nature; there is the magical character of the two trees, the rise of sexual consciousness, the curse over the heredity of Adam, the body of the woman, the animals and the land.
These traits show that a cosmic myth is hidden behind the psychological-ethical form of the story and that the prophetic “demythologization” of this myth has not removed, but rather subordinated, the mythical elements to the ethical point of view. The cosmic myth reappears in the Bible in the form of the struggle of the divine with demonic powers and the powers of chaos and darkness. It reappears also in the myth of the Fall of the angels and in the interpretation of the serpent as the embodiment of a fallen angel. These examples all point to the cosmic presuppositions and implications of the Fall of Adam …
—Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology
The Pain of Childbirth
So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continued increase in cranial volume. Modern man and woman have brain cases twice the volume of Homo habilis. Childbirth is painful because the evolution of the human skull has been spectacularly fast and recent. The American anatomist C. Judson Herrick described the development of the neocortex in the following terms: “Its explosive growth late in philogeny is one of the most dramatic cases of evolutionary transformation known to comparative anatomy.” The incomplete closure of the skull at birth, the fontanelle, is very likely an imperfect accommodation to this recent brain evolution.
—Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden
Death Enters the World
One of the earliest consequences of the anticipatory skills that accompanied the evolution of the prefrontal lobes must have been the awareness of death. Humans are probably the only organism on earth with a relatively clear view of the inevitability of his own end. Burial ceremonies that include the interment of food and artifacts along with the deceased go back at least to the times of our Neanderthal cousins, suggesting not only a widespread awareness of death but also an already developed ritual ceremony to sustain the deceased in the afterli
fe. It is not that death was absent before the spectacular growth of the neocortex, before the exile fom Eden; it is only that, until then, no one had ever noticed that death would be his destiny.
—Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden
THE TALMUDIC FALL
Satan, or Samael, entered the Garden of Eden (Gan Eden) riding on the back of a serpent. When the animals saw the serpent approach, they smelled the presence of evil and fled in terror.
Satan remembered the angelic songs he had learned while in heaven and began singing them in a sweet voice. Eve, totally innocent, stopped to listen to this beautiful music and became completely mesmerized. Hearing the praises of the Most High God, she listened intently and could hardly move. The serpent climbed up a tree and bit the fruit, releasing the venom of evil intention. While Eve was caught up in his musical spell, Satan urged her to eat this fruit, which she did. She then called to Adam to take a bite, and he did. With this action, the venom of evil intention coursed through their veins and became part of their very flesh and nature for, according to the Rabbis, the blood is where life resides. As soon as Adam and Eve finished eating, their eyes became dimmed to the Shekhinah, the “countenance” of God. For prior to this, they were able to look at God directly in the face and converse with him—but no longer.
With evil intention came desire, and nakedness fuels desire. The band around their shoulder that bore the name of God fell off their bodies. They were entirely naked, felt shame for the first time, and went to hide in the bushes.
The Most High God then cast Adam and Eve out of Gan Eden and posted the Cherubim,* armed with swords of fire, at the entrance.
The earth, you will recall, was reluctant to give up any of her soil for the creation of humans, as she knew that someday Adam would cause the earth to be cursed. As she had predicted, every manner of poisonous plant and noxious weed sprang from her body. Her beautiful fruits were now eaten by worms and insects. Rain was now necessary to keep her alive.
The righteous angels in heaven grieved over the fall of humankind. The cruel Lillith, who especially hated Eve, laughed bitterly to see humankind so stupidly separate itself from God. Of all the things God created, only the moon laughed. As a punishment, God dimmed its light so that it shines in the way it does today.
Adam, Eve, and Lillith
The Talmudic commentators noted a number of interesting linguistic connections with the name of Adam. Adam means “man” in Hebrew, while adamah means “soil.” Adam sounds like the word edom or adom, meaning “red,” the color of a newborn child emerging from the womb. Adam’s name, which is spelled with the Hebrew letters aleph, daleth, and mem, recalls the elements of the human body in traditional Hebrew medicine: apher (“dust”), dam (“blood”), and marah (“bitter,” also the word for “bile”). The Jews of postbiblical times believed that these three elements had to be in their proper proportion or the human body would sicken and die (Graves and Patai, Hebrew Myth).
Scholars Robert Graves and Raphael Patai also trace the origin of Lillith to a Babylonian and Assyrian evil female wind spirit (Hebrew Myth).
Compare Lillith to Johi in the Persian Creation story.
THE STORY OF POIA
(Blackfoot Indian)
NOTE: This myth, from the Blackfoot Indians of the Great Plains of North America, contains many interesting parallels with the biblical story of the Fall.
Once during the summer in the earliest times, when it was too hot to sleep indoors, a beautiful maiden named Feather-woman slept outside in the tall prairie grass. She opened her eyes just as the Morning Star came into view, and she began to look on it with wonder. She mused in her heart how beautiful it was, and she fell in love with it. When her sisters got up, she told them that she had fallen in love with the Morning Star. They told her that she was insane! Feather-woman told everyone in her village about the Morning Star and soon she was an object of ridicule among her people.
One day she left the village to draw some water out of a creek. There she saw the most handsome young man she had ever imagined. At first she thought that he was a young man of her own tribe who had been hunting, and she coyly avoided him. But he then identified himself as the Morning Star. He said, “I know that you were watching me and fell in love with me. Even as you were looking up at the sky, I was looking down at you. I watched you in the tall prairie grass and knew that it was only you that I wanted for my wife. Come with me to my home in the sky.”
Feather-woman was stricken with awe and paralyzed with fear. She knew that this was a god standing before her. She told Morning Star that she would need time to say good-bye to her parents and sisters. However, he told her that there was no time for this. He then gave her a magic yellow feather in one hand and a juniper branch in the other. Then he told her to close her eyes. When she opened them again, she was in the Sky-Country, standing before the lodge of Morning Star, home of his parents, the Sun and the Moon, where they were married. As it was daytime, the Sun was out doing his work, but the mother, the Moon, was at home doing chores. She immediately took a liking to the girl and gave her fine robes to wear.
Feather-woman loved her husband and his parents, and in time she gave birth to a little boy whom they named Star Boy. But Feather-woman needed to find things to do in her new home. So the Moon gave her a root-digging stick to work with, carefully instructing her not to dig up the Great Turnip that grew near the home of the Spider Man, warning that terrible ills would be unleashed if she did so.
Feather-woman was fascinated by the Great Turnip and wondered why it was feared. After all, it looked like any other turnip, only much larger. She walked closely around it, being careful not to touch it. She took Star Boy off her back and placed him on the ground. As she was digging, two great cranes flew overhead. She asked the cranes to help her and they obliged her, singing a secret magic song that made light work of digging the Great Turnip.
Now, the Moon had been very wise in warning Feather-woman not to dig around the Great Turnip, for it plugged the hole through which Morning Star had brought Feather-woman into the Sky-Country. With a loud plop she pulled the Great Turnip out. Looking down through the hole, she saw a camp of the Blackfoot Indians, perhaps her own village, far below her. As she saw the mortals doing their daily chores below, she became homesick and began to weep. In order to conceal what she had done, she rolled the turnip loosely into place and returned to the lodge where she lived with her husband and son.
When Morning Star returned to the lodge, he was very sad. He said nothing, then, “How could you have been disobedient and dug up the Great Turnip?” Moon and Sun were also sad and asked her the same question.
At first Feather-woman did not answer, then she admitted her disobedience. Her in-laws had known that she would dig up the Great Turnip, despite their warnings. The reason for the sadness was that they knew that she had disobeyed them and must now be banished forever from the Sky-Country.
The next day, Morning Star took his wife to Spider Man, who built a web from the hole of the Great Turnip down to earth. When Feather-woman descended down the web, it looked to the people below like a star falling from the sky.
When Feather-woman arrived on earth with her child, she was welcomed by her parents and the people of their village. But she was never happy. Early in the morning, she looked up at the sky to speak with Morning Star, but he didn’t answer her.
After many months had passed, Morning Star finally did speak to her. “You can never return to the Sky-Country,” he warned. “You have committed a great sin and brought unhappiness and death into the world.” Hearing this was too much for Feather-woman to bear; soon she died of her unhappiness.
The orphaned Star Boy lived with his human grandparents until they died. He was a shy boy who ran as soon as he heard the approach of a stranger’s footsteps. The most notable thing about him was a scar on his face, which led to his nickname, Poia, meaning “scarface.” As he grew into manhood, people cruelly ridiculed him because of his scar and his pretension to be
the son of the Morning Star.
Thus maltreated, Poia was heartbroken by the further indignity of being rejected by the daughter of a chief. His life growing unbearable, Poia consulted with an old medicine woman. She told him that there was only one way for the scar to be removed: He would have to return to the Sky-Country and have his grandfather, the Sun, take it off. Knowing that his mother had been banished from the Sky-Country, this was bad news to Poia. How could he return to the land of his birth? The old woman said that there was a way back to the Sky-Country, but that Poia must find it himself. Feeling sorry for the boy, she gave him some food for the journey.
Poia traveled for days and days, over mountains, through forests, through snow, and across deserts, until he reached the Great Water that the white man calls the Pacific Ocean, for this is the farthest west, where the sun goes at night. For three days, Poia fasted and prayed. On the third day, he saw rays reflecting on the Great Water, forming a path to the Sun. He followed the path and arrived at the home of his grandparents, the Sun and the Moon.
Upon finding Poia asleep on their doorstep, the Sun was at first prepared to kill the mortal, as no earth-dweller could enter the Sky-Country. But the Moon persuaded him not to do so; she recognized the scar and told the Sun that it was their grandson. Soon, Moon, Sun, and Morning Star all welcomed Poia. At the request of his grandson, the Sun removed the scar.
The Sun also taught Poia great magic and the truths of the world. Poia’s grandfather explained that the people on earth were suffering as a result of Feather-woman’s disobedience. The Sun had a message for the Blackfoot people: If they would honor him but once a year by doing the Sun dance, all the sick would be healed. Poia himself learned the Sun dance quickly, and his grandfather grew to love him very much. His grandparents gave him a magic flute to charm women into falling in love with him. But, because of his mother’s disobedience, Poia had to return to earth, which he did by walking down the Milky Way.
Parallel Myths Page 10
